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Business Intelligence: Stop Playing Hide and Seek

Database management continues to be a challenge for most organizations. The drivers associated with this challenge can be contributed to many factors:
 Mergers & acquisitions
 Compliance regulations
 Exponential growth
 Increasing challenges associated with forecasting market behavior as business builds a strategy to remain competitive

Whatever the motivational factors, having the ability to read and react at a moment’s notice is driving the pace of business. As such, businesses are faced with an important question:

Do I have end-to-end visibility into critical business functions?

If your business is like the majority of organizations within the current market, my guess is that there’s substantial room for improvement. A Business Intelligence (BI) application module bolts on to an existing application stack and expands horizontally across the enterprise. It integrates otherwise limited data silos to maximize the analysis, interpretation and presentation of business information.

BI is the solution set designed to address this key obstacle, which is limiting the full potential of business growth.

Two key factors to consider
From an executive perspective, the value of a BI solution is significant when you consider the end-to-end visibility and manageability gained from access to important business data for decision-making and multi-dimensional analysis.

Having the ability to capture information about how activities in various business units affect one another is key to developing a strategy that establishes value. In addition, bypassing data conversion results in faster answers and more efficient business activity.

BI allows organizations to strategically leverage data warehouses at a level that provides key decision makers with the necessary information needed to drive business processes.

Cost reduction is another valuable benefit associated with business intelligence. Having the ability to consolidate otherwise redundant infrastructure resources can have a clear impact on a company’s financial resources.

Consider the costs associated with infrastructure management and other IT-related overhead expenditures, as well as the benefits of data reuse. All things considered, through the proper use of BI applications, there is a clear opportunity to:
 Significantly reduce current and future operating costs
 Avoid complexities associated with data quality
 Bring value to the bottom line

Start managing data rather than it managing you
As you look to bridge the gap between where you are today and where you would like to be in terms of visibility into critical business functions, much time and consideration must be given to the development of a strategy that makes sense for your organization.

As you develop your strategy, it’s critical to involve owners, managers and users of each type of data and application in regularly-scheduled discussions. With their input and approvals, your organization will be in a better position to properly leverage your data warehouse, instead of it managing you.